Does your organisation have volunteer capability or a volunteer manager?

There's a question I think every CEO of an organisation that involves volunteers should ask:

Does our organisation have volunteer capability or does it have a volunteer manager?

At first glance they sound like the same thing. They aren't.

A skilled volunteer manager matters. A good one holds relationships, works through complexity, solves problems, advocates for volunteers and keeps a lot of moving parts connected. When the organisation relies on that one person to make volunteering work, though, it has a volunteer management role. It may not yet have organisational capability around volunteering.

What volunteer capability means

Volunteer capability is the organisation's ability to understand, support and sustain volunteering as part of how it operates. Volunteering doesn't sit in a corner as something one specialist looks after. People know what they're responsible for. Key processes are understood. Knowledge is shared. Decisions about volunteering connect with organisational priorities. When something changes, the organisation has enough understanding and structure to respond.

The volunteer manager still plays a central role. They may hold the deepest specialist knowledge, see the connections others miss and lead improvement. What they don't do is carry the entire system on their shoulders.

When one person becomes the system

Take a volunteer manager who's been there for years.

They know the history and why each process was introduced. They know which policies are useful and which ones everyone works around. They know the volunteers, the organisational politics and where the risks are. They know who to call when something goes wrong and which decisions can be made quickly.

Because they're capable, the organisation appears to function well. Until they take leave. Or move into another role. Or leave. Or the organisation restructures. Or the program grows beyond what one person can reasonably hold.

That's when the organisation finds out how much one role was carrying.

There's a cost before that point too. When one person carries the system, every question, unusual situation and decision comes to them. They become the bottleneck. They spend so much time keeping the existing system moving that there's little capacity left to ask whether it needs to change.

The volunteer manager isn't the problem

The answer is to stop making the volunteer manager responsible for things the organisation itself needs to hold.

A volunteer manager shouldn't have to be the organisation's memory. They shouldn't have to keep explaining how volunteering works to the people making decisions that affect volunteers. They shouldn't have to solve every problem personally because nobody else understands the system, hold every relationship or translate volunteering into organisational language each time a strategic decision is made.

When that happens, the role becomes both highly prized and structurally vulnerable. The more capable the person, the easier it is to overlook the dependency.

If your volunteer manager left tomorrow

For a CEO, this is an organisational question. If that person left, would you lose a person or a significant part of the organisation's ability to understand and support volunteering?

Some knowledge should sit with the specialist. Other knowledge needs to sit more widely.

Who understands the strategic contribution volunteers make?
Who understands the organisation's responsibilities towards volunteers?
Who knows how volunteer-related decisions connect with other parts of the organisation?
Who understands the key processes and where the vulnerabilities are?
Who could keep things moving if the volunteer manager was suddenly unavailable?

If the answers keep pointing to one person, you have a capability gap.

Capability changes the question

Seeing it this way changes the question from "How do we get our volunteer manager to manage this better?" to "What does the organisation need to be able to do?" It separates problems that need a person from problems that need a system.

The gap might sit in any of these places:

The volunteer manager needs more support.
Responsibilities elsewhere aren't clear.
Information doesn't reach enough people.
A process relies on informal knowledge.
Volunteering comes into strategic conversations too late.
The organisation has grown and the systems supporting volunteering haven't.

Each of those needs a different response.

What changes when capability is shared

Shared capability doesn't mean layers of bureaucracy. It might mean:

Clearer responsibilities and documented critical knowledge.
Leaders who understand the role volunteering plays in organisational outcomes.
Volunteer considerations built into planning and decisions.
Knowing where the volunteer manager is the only person who knows how something works.
Processes people can use instead of more documents.

The volunteer manager then spends more time on the work that needs their expertise. Other people take responsibility for the parts that belong in their roles. The organisation depends less on individual heroics.

One test is worth repeating: if the people holding this knowledge changed, would the organisation still know what to do?

Don't confuse activity with capability

A busy volunteer program can look healthy. Lots of volunteers, events, recruitment and processes. A stretched volunteer manager. The underlying system may still be fragile. That's why I look at what sits underneath.

Where does the knowledge sit?
Where are the dependencies?
What's working because the system is sound?
What's working because someone exceptionally capable is holding it together?

Why this strengthens the volunteer manager's role

Building capability doesn't diminish a volunteer manager's expertise. It strengthens their position. The role shifts from the person who has to know everything to the person who helps the organisation understand what it needs to know.

That means identifying dependencies, making invisible issues visible, helping colleagues understand their responsibilities, building systems that make good practice easier and sharing knowledge instead of being the place where it stops. It means building something that keeps working beyond one person's contribution.

Five questions for your next leadership conversation

If our volunteer manager left tomorrow, what knowledge or capability would leave with them?
Who else in the organisation understands how volunteering contributes to our strategy?
Where are we relying on one person to make the volunteer system work?
Which parts of our volunteer program are supported by organisational systems and which depend on individual knowledge?
What would we need to change so our volunteer capability could withstand changes in people, structure and strategy?

You don't need all the answers to start. The questions themselves will show you a lot.

People change. Structures and strategies change. The aim is a volunteer system that can hold when they do.